Friday, July 19, 2013

I am in agreement with Kierkegaard one thing.
The ethical dimension can not subsume the aesthetic or sacred dimension. For
this reason, I like criticism that discerns the politics in an art work, but I
hate criticism that subsumes the aesthetic dimension to the political one.
Politics is primary in its own sphere, but is secondary in the aesthetic
sphere, where seeing, touching, tasting and orient ourselves are primary. How
we strategize about using the power of these primary forces has a strong political
aspect –so strong that we might reject some entertainment because it is racist,
sexist, etc. – but its other aspect is always about delight. Although we live
in a world in which every horizon seems to be blocked by the market, and every
interaction is now called a negotiation, a joke is funny or not before it is
correct. Any account of a work that dissolves it into its ideological attitudes
and claims, thus, to give a total account of the work, strips it of its civil
rights – its primary power. It is an act of violence as surely as blinding a
prisoner is an act of violence.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.